Truck on a truck
About May 30, 2024, I was driving on I-25, southbound, south of Loveland. I passed by a flatbed truck with a yellow, plastic dump truck strapped to the flatbed.
In June, 2024, I passed probably the same flatbed. This time it had a toy excavator strapped to it. Either the truck driver has a sense of humor, or possibly the trucking company puts a small model of what the flatbed is to be loaded with on it to avoid mistakes.
In May, I thought seeing a toy dump truck strapped to an 18-wheeler was odd. At great risk to life and limb, I took a number of pictures of it with my Google Pixel 6 phone.
Google thoughtfully combined the pictures I took into a nightmarish pastiche.
You can see the yellow toy dump truck three times in the pastiche. On the left of the photo, probably derived from the first image I made, the flatbed is farthest away. The middle appearance of the toy dump truck is probably from the second image I took, but Google made the flatbed trailer into something towed by a pickup truck, which appeared in the first image I took. The third, right hand, appearance of the toy dump truck probably derives from the final image I took.
Google’s picture-stitching AI almost gets it right: pickups often tow a trailer of some sort. But it’s just wrong enough to make you flinch.
I have to wonder if the picture-stitcher has been influenced by Cubism. Clearly the picture-stitcher has analyzed, broken up, and reassembled my images of everyday transport in an abstract form. Instead of depicting the dump truck from a single perspective, the picture-stitcher combined images to allow us to view the subject from multiple perspectives, representing the dump truck in a greater context